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Singapore grips memory into recollections of Hong Kong

Reading about 1930’s Singapore in J.G. Farrell’s “The Singapore Grip” has got me thinking about a similarly bubbling metropolis built on trade and capital and no less colorful and gaudy: Hong Kong.

I visited Honk Kong in 2011, drawn by the obvious attractions but also having grown up hearing tales about the city. My father, after a few Gin & Tonics, has been known to reminisce at the dinner table about his time stationed outside the city as a young army dentist in the 1960’s.

Funnily enough, one of my grandmothers is Hong Kong-Chinese–an interesting but long story to explain that familial tie–from whom I also heard stories about this city, as well as being able to look through her photo album of a sepia-toned Hong Kong without the skyscrapers and neon lights.

One of my grandmother’s friends living in Hong Kong chaperoned me around the island, a fact one often doesn’t appreciate: beyond the towering city is a lush island of winding cliff-top roads, beaches and colonial buildings from days when the British sipped their cocktails in the muggy heat of Hong Kong and Singapore and surveyed their Empire.

Cool line from Rudyard Kipling

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.